Mondrian’s Firebomb: Avant-Garde and Underdevelopment in Brazil

This seminar reinterprets the trajectory of the short-lived Brazilian art movement known as “Neo-Concretism”. Distancing themselves from the more mechanistic experiments with geometric abstraction taking place elsewhere in the country, a group of artists based in Rio de Janeiro superseded the impasse of formalism in 1950s Brazil by returning to the expressive qualities of works by the likes of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, of whose projects they positioned themselves as the teleological completion. Finding its most original iteration in the output of Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, Neo-Concretism reinvented the project of the historical avant-garde from the standpoint of the periphery. And yet, by 1961, the movement had largely run out of steam. Recognizing this deadlock, the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar proposed to mount one final terrorist exhibition in which all of the Neo-Concretists’ works would self-detonate after one hour. The artists themselves soon abandoned the medium of painterly abstraction to embrace participatory forms of performance, installation and sculpture, channelling the energies of an increasingly radicalized left political culture. However, the hardening of the military regime toward the end of the 1960s curtailed this proto-revolutionary sequence, forcing many artists and intellectuals into exile. 

Re-evaluating the legacy of Neo-Concretism through a conjunctural analysis of 1960s Brazil, this seminar asks: What are the political and artistic problems to which the European avant-garde poses a historical solution, and how do these presuppositions fare when taken up in the periphery, where foreign forms are always affirmed improperly, skewed and distorted as part of the systemic misplacement of ideas?

All welcome. No booking required.

Image credit: Hélio Oiticica, B17 Glass Bólide 05 “Homage to Mondrian” (1965) [© Projeto Hélio Oiticica]

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.